Haze

A paper clip chain may just seem like the impromptu craft project of a bored office worker, but in the right hands, it could aspire to higher things. Imagine thousands of paper clip chains, enough to create a shimmering curtain of metal.

It’s something Tara Donovan could pull off. In the artist’s work, inexpensive commonplace materials are taken to glorious, labor-intensive extremes in her gorgeous sculptural installations. She brought her quotidian brand of alchemy to Rice Gallery for the installation Haze.

Previous Donovan installations have employed everything from toothpicks to tar paper in such enormous quantities that they transcend their origins. Clusters of Styrofoam coffee cups hung from a ceiling become a glorious luminous firmament. Layers of torn tar paper on a floor create the black topography of an alien planet—a cross between Hawaii’s lava fields and a glacier. Paper plates attached together are fanned out into elegantly organic spheres; the results mimic the otherworldliness of an electron microscope photograph of bacteria. In Tara Donovan’s world, the banal becomes ascendant and transcendent.

Donovan uses these manufactured, mass-produced consumer materials in an intensely organic fashion. The components cluster together according to their individual properties. For her installation Moiré, massive whorls of adding machine tape sinuously drape over each other. In another work, Scotch tape is adhered to itself to make tiny towers that adhere to each other and cover the floor with translucent, crystalline-looking structures.

Her piece Colony used chunks of no. 2 pencils cut to various heights. Their six-sided shapes allowed them to mass together like cells. Up close, they could be clusters of skyscrapers, but viewing them in their totality, it appeared as if some giant fungus was spreading over the floor. In Goo, Elmer’s Glue, another school supply item, was transformed into thousands of overlapping, translucently milky puddles.

For Haze, the Rice Gallery installation, Donovan turned her attention to that ubiquitous fast food accoutrement, drinking straws. We aren’t just talking a couple of boxes here—by the artist’s estimate there are over a million. The construction took place during four days as Donovan worked with a nine-person team that included student volunteers. Donovan stacked the straws like cordwood, 11 feet high, all along the 44-foot rear wall of the gallery. Amassed together, the tiny cylinders of translucent plastic become an aesthetic tour de force.

Entering the gallery, you have no idea what the sculpture facing you is composed of. It looks like a snow bank but far more delicate; the tiny circular straw ends look as ephemeral as a wall of bubbles. The surface undulates in and out, cloudlike and faintly organic. It is a spectacular visual effect that is only enhanced by the knowledge that it is composed of such a stupidly ordinary material.

Unlike most artists, Donovan can’t make these works once and be done with them. When a work is purchased, it has to be recreated each time it is installed. Donovan considers her work site-responsive, and the epic process of installation is different with each showing. Haze is owned by the Andrea Nasher Collection of Dallas, and the Rice Gallery exhibition is only the second time the work has been installed. The first showing took place at Ace Gallery, where it was purchased.

In a world grown increasing ugly with obscene quantities of consumer goods, Tara Donovan’s work gives hope. Walk the aisles of a monolithic consumer citadel like Sam’s Wholesale Club, with its towering boxes of Styrofoam plates, institutional-size cylinders of transparent plastic wrap, massive blocks of paper towels and toilet paper, and weighty, giant economy-sized cubes of heavy duty trash bags, and suddenly, all these things have a potential higher purpose. You realize there is beauty hidden in the sheer materiality of these products. If only Tara Donovan would come along and transform them, that 1,000-pack of Styrofoam plates does not have to become a casualty of a church spaghetti supper, and those trash bags won’t have to end their days in the, um, trash.

—Kelly Klaasmeyer